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The Everyday Making of Citizen Journalism on Twitter

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The Everyday Making of Citizen Journalism on Twitter To Yell @ the Wind: The Everyday Making of Citizen Journalism on Twitter June 16, 2013 Student: Supervisor: Diana Chichifoi Prof. Dr. Kristina Riegert Master Thesis Media and Communication Studies Department of Media Studies (IMS) Stockholm University Abstract Manifestations of citizen journalism on Twitter have been mainly analyzed around trending stories, associated with public campaigns or breaking news. Microbloggers' everyday attempts to contribute to professional media coverage, however, have been scarcely addressed in the literature. This research analyzes the practice of tweeting at influential news outlets by using a mixed-method approach. Content analysis and directed queries about users' own motivation to tweet at media explore the interaction between regular users and professional news networks. Results show that there is a predisposition towards negative media commentary followed closely by newsworthy topics generated by the users, which replicate to a large extent mainstream media's agenda. When asked directly in the feed `why do you tweet at media?', users explain their motivations to address news outlets in diverging ways, from explicit citizen journalism mission, to visibility claims and coincidental tagging. The study contributes to the study of citizen journalism on social media platforms and elaborates a mixed method approach suited for this type of online data. Keywords: citizen journalism, gatekeeping, agenda-setting, news values, content analysis, social media, Twitter Acknowledgements I would like to thank Prof. Dr. Kristina Riegert for having taken the time and effort to guide me through this academic journey of many a treacherous turn. I am grateful to my parents for inspiring and motivating me and for watching my steps so far; to my sister, for her help with coding, encouragements and open heart; to C~alin for reviewing my work, for his patience and unconditional support. 2 Contents 1 Introduction 5 2 Materials and Research Aims 7 3 Literature Review 8 3.1 Twitter: features and premises of generating news . 8 3.2 Citizen journalism . 11 3.2.1 Citizen journalism on Twitter { Premises . 14 3.2.2 Citizen journalism on Twitter { Implications . 15 3.2.3 Gatekeeping . 15 3.2.4 Newsworthiness on Twitter . 17 3.2.5 Agenda-setting . 18 3.2.6 Some Broader Implications of Citizen Journalism on Twitter . 19 3.3 Self-promotion on Twitter . 21 4 Research design 24 4.1 A mixed-method approach . 24 4.2 Content analysis . 25 4.2.1 Sampling and data collection . 26 4.2.2 Operationalization of variables . 27 4.2.3 Pilot study . 28 4.2.4 Coding . 29 4.3 Qualitative interrogation { Twitter replies . 29 4.3.1 Operationalization . 30 4.3.2 Data collection . 31 4.4 Research evaluation . 32 4.4.1 Reliability . 33 4.4.2 Validity . 33 4.4.3 Replicability . 33 5 Results 34 5.1 Content Analysis { Results . 34 5.2 Twitter replies { Results . 37 5.3 An integrative perspective . 42 6 Discussion 43 6.1 Tweeting at news media { Purpose and dynamics . 43 6.2 What makes news according to twitterers . 47 6.3 Personal drive to yell @ the wind . 49 7 Conclusions 51 8 References 55 3 9 Appendix I 65 9.1 Codebook . 65 9.2 Decision rules . 73 10 Appendix II 74 10.1 Intercoder reliability tests . 74 11 Appendix III 75 11.1 Descriptive statistics . 75 12 Appendix IV 78 12.1 Collected Twitter replies . 78 4 1 Introduction Playing the journalist, the media critic or the active citizen in a 140-character script is a difficult mission. A one-time shout on Twitter that speaks a relevant message to the masses can raise global awareness and catch the media's attention { or it could get lost in the feed. Since Twitter's launch in 2006, users have developed practices of gathering and spreading the news using microblogging tools. When twitterers want to enrich their social media experience with a journalistic feel, they often participate in news production next to, or against, professional media. Tweeting `@' influential media outlets happens daily and spontaneously, as users criticize, appraise or notify professional media about newsworthy content, even outside `trending topics'. Issues considered of public interest which are brought up by regular users stand for the everyday making of citizen journalism on Twitter. Messages directed at professional media are central to this study, which aims to explore the newsworthy content issued by twitterers and the users' own reasons to interact with mainstream media on this platform. The way information, and especially news, is collected and replicated using Twitter has been addressed in media research under various angles. Twitter features make it easy for users to filter content based on individual preferences and to discover trends with information value. What people `follow', mention (@) or hashtag (#) in their messages reflects to a large extent their interests and Twitter routines. Users' constant exposure to real-time news reporting also explains why the most popular, trending topics derive from news stories (Thelwall et al., 2011). As an interactive environment, Twitter not only affects \the way news is gathered, disseminated, and consumed" (Hermida, 2012, p. 2), but also encourages active responses to news. As a participatory tool, microblogging has mainly been analyzed around salient media events, such as social uprisings (Hermida, Lewis, and Zamith, 2012; Knight, 2012; Papacharissi & de Fatima Oliveira, 2012), political campaigns (Larsson & Moe, 2012; Christensen, 2013), natural disasters (Smith, 2010) crises (Levinson, 2009), or as source for breaking news (Murthy, 2011). In previous empirical studies content with maximum visibility in the network made the object of research, while the more personalized ways of interacting with media on Twitter have not been addressed. News threads started on Twitter that became mainstream stories continue to inspire users to address their messages to professional media. Tagging the media in a tweet is a common way to reach out to a broader audience or more directly tell something to certain media outlets. This practice and the content thus generated have been scarcely 5 addressed in the literature so far. The reasons vary: such tweets emerge spontaneously from a personal motivation, do not have a common topic or purpose, and address different media outlets at a time, without a specific selection pattern. As a general practice, tweeting at professional media shows users' awareness of how news is made and their active interest in influencing it. Providing an alternative to the mainstream news selection, a fact check or a critique, users' tweeting agendas are an analytically interesting scenario which can describe the everyday performance of citizen journalism on Twitter. Similarities and differences between citizen-made journalism and professional news reporting can be explained based on this type of user-generated content. This research is motivated by the `everyday' aspect of tweeting with a news agenda citizen journalism has `happened' repeatedly on Twitter, and has received growing attention from media scholars. What has been missing, however, is an analysis of the daily exercises in news-making via Twitter. This study attempts to address the interaction between regular users and news media by establishing a typology of tweets and exploring the potential news agenda behind them. Outline The study begins with a general description of the research aims and materials in Chapter 2. The theoretical background in Chapter 3 presents the main directions of research that connect Twitter use with citizen journalism, the media's gatekeeping and agenda-setting processes, and the more general social media routines. The research design in Chapter 4 first outlines the mixed-method approach, with special consideration given to the adaptation of methods to the type of material and the online environment in general. The method description further progresses from content analysis to qualitative interrogation in the Twitter feed. The results of the two methods are presented in Chapter 5, following the three research questions. The implications of the findings are presented in Chapter 6, in the light of citizen journalism practices and social media use, with an eye on emerging directions of research. Chapter 7 concludes the study, by presenting potential methodological improvements and several questions raised by the present research. 6 2 Materials and Research Aims The goal of this study is to explore messages and the intention behind the content directed by Twitter users at influential news networks. The analysis concentrates on tweets with multiple, i.e. two or more, news media addressees. The user-tagging function (i.e. `@username') is used as a content selection tool, to define the population of units considered for analysis. A more detailed description of Twitter functions in the forthcoming chapter anticipates the roles assumed by the users when confronting professional media. The intention behind tweeting at media outlets can be analyzed under several angles. First, by looking strictly at the text content posted on Twitter, several reasons for addressing professional media can be mapped. Previous research on social media use, citizen journalism and participatory forms of news-making will provide the background to help identify these reasons. Second, users' self-explained motivation to tweet at professional media can provide deeper insight into how personal microblogging habits are oriented by and around news media. In general, accounts tagged on Twitter are seen as direct recipients
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